The So-Called Evidence Is a Farce

By Stan Goff

from
http://narconews.com/goff1.html:
((Narco News Commentary: The following text has been
circulating as an e-mail for some hours now. It has
found a home at Narco News.

About two years ago, Stan Goff came to our attention
when he wrote a brilliant critique of U.S. policy in
Colombia and its narco-pretext for other agendas. This
essay, like his previous work, is a "must read"
for anyone attempting to understand the immediate historical
situation that all the world today faces. Unfortunately,
we have been unable to make contact with Stan Goff,
and if readers can help us with a current email address
or phone number, please send it along to narconews@hotmail.com.
We believe that his message is of great urgency and
importance, and the fact that it is alreadycirculating
by email suggests a desire by the author to have it
read by the widest possible readership. We hope we
are correct in that assumption. Thus, we publish it
here.))

***
The So-Called Evidence Is a Farce

By Stan Goff

I'm a retired Special Forces Master Sergeant. That doesn't
cut much for those who will only accept the opinions
of former officers on military matters, since we enlisted
swine are assumed to be incapable of grasping the nuances
of doctrine.

But I wasn't just in the army. I studied and taught
military science and doctrine. I was a tactics instructor
at the Jungle Operations Training Center in Panama,
and I taught Military Science at West Point. And contrary
to the popular image of what Special Forces does, SF's
mission is to teach. We offer advice and assistance
to foreign forces. That's everything from teaching
marksmanship to a private to instructing a Battalion
staff on how to coordinate effective air operations
with a sister service.

Based on that experience, and operations in eight designated
conflict areas from Vietnam to Haiti, I have to say
that the story we hear on the news and read in the
newspapers is simply not believable. The most cursory
glance at the verifiable facts, before, during, and
after September 11th, does not support the official
line or conform to the current actions of the United
States government.

But the official line only works if they can get everyone
to accept its underlying premises. I'm not atall surprised
about the Republican and Democratic Parties repeating
these premises. They are simply two factions within
a single dominant political class, and both are financed
by the same economic powerhouses. My biggest disappointment,
as someone who identifies himself with the left, has
been the tacit acceptance of those premises by others
on the left, sometimes naively, and sometimes to score
some morality points. Those premises are twofold. One,
there is the premise that what this de facto administration
is doing now is a "response" to September
11th. Two, there is the premise that this attack on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was done by
people based in Afghanistan. In my opinion, neither
of these is sound.

To put this in perspective we have to go back not to
September 11th, but to last year or further.

A man of limited intelligence, George W. Bush, with
nothing more than his name and the behind-the-scenes
pressure of his powerful father-a former President,
ex-director of Central Intelligence, and an oil man-is
systematically constructed as a candidate, at tremendous
cost. Across the country, subtle and not-so-subtle
mechanisms are put into place to disfranchise a significant
fraction of the Democrat's African-American voter base.
This doesn't come out until Florida becomes a battleground
for Electoral College votes, and the magnitude of the
story has been suppressed by the corporate media to
this day. In a decision so lacking in legitimacy, the
Supreme Court will neither by-line the author of the
decision nor allow the decision to ever be used as
a precedent, Bush v. Gore awards the presidency of
the United States to a man who loses the popular vote
in Florida and loses the national popular vote by over
600,000.

This de facto regime then organizes a very interesting
cabinet. The Vice President is an oil executive and
the former Secretary of Defense. The National Security
Advisor is a director on the board of a transnational
oil corporation and a Russia scholar. The Secretary
of State is a man with no diplomatic experience whatsoever,
and the former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The other interesting appointment is Donald Rumsfeld
as Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld is the former CEO
of Searle Pharmaceuticals. He and Cheney were featured
as speakers at the May, 2000, Russian-American Business
Leaders Forum. So the consistent currents in this cabinet
are petroleum, the former Soviet Union, and the military.

Based on the record of Daddy Bush, in all his guises,
and the general trajectory of US foreign policy as
far back as the Carter Administration, I feel I can
reasonably conclude that Middle Eastern and South Asian
fossil fuels are one of their major preoccupations.
Not just because this klavern has some very direct
financial interests in fossil fuel, but because they
surely know that worldwide oil production is peaking
as we speak, and will soon begin a permanent and precipitousdecline
that will completely change the character of civilization
as we know it within 20 years. Even the left seems
to be in deep denial about this, but the math is available.
And, no, alternative energies and energy technologies
will not save us. All the alternatives in the world
can not begin to provide more than a tiny fraction
of the energy base now provided by oil. This makes
it more than a resource, and the drive to control what's
left more than an economic competition.

I further conclude that the economic colonization of
the former Soviet Union is probably high on that agenda,
and in fact has a powerful synergy with the issue of
petroleum. Russia not only holds vast untapped resources
that beckon to imperialism in crisis, it remains a
credible military and nuclear challenger in the region.

We have not one, but three members of the Bush de facto
cabinet with military credentials, which makes the
cabinet look quite a lot like a military General Staff.
All this way before September 11th.

Then there's the subject of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization. NATO might have expected consignment
to the dustbin of the Cold War after the Eastern Bloc
shattered in 1991. Peace dividend and all that. But
it didn't. It expanded directly into the former states
of the Eastern Bloc toward the former Soviet Union,
and contributed significant forces to the devastation
of Iraq-a key country in the world oil market, over
which control translates into the ability to manipulate
oil prices.

NATO is a military formation, and the United States
exerts the controlling interest in it. It seemed like
a form without a function, but it remedied that pretty
quickly.

Then when Yugoslavia refused to play ball with the International
Monetary Fund, the US and Germany began a systematic
campaign of destabilization there, even using some
of the veterans of Afghanistan in that campaign.

NATO became the military arm of that agenda-the break-up
of Yugoslavia into compliant statelets, the further
containment of the former Soviet Union, and the future
pipeline easement for Caspain Sea oil to Western European
markets through Kosovo.

You see, this is important to understand, and people-even
those against the war talk-are tending to overlook
the significance of it. NATO is not a guarantor of
international law, and it is not a humanitarian organization.

It is a military alliance with one very dominant partner.
And it can no longer claim to be a defensive alliance
against European socialists. It is an instrument of
military aggression.

NATO is the organization that is now going to thrust
further along the 40th parallel from the Balkans through
the Southern Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union.
The US military has already taken control of a base
in Uzbekistan. No one is talking about how what we
are doing seems to be a very logical extension of a
strategy that was already in motion, and has been in
motion for two decades. Once we recognize the pattern
of activity designed to simultaneously consolidate
control over Middle Eastern and South Asian oil, and
contain and colonize the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan
is exactly where they need to go to pursue that agenda.

Afghanistan borders Iran, Pakistan, and even China but,
more importantly, the Central Asian Republics of the
former Soviet Union, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan.
These border Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan borders Russia.
Turkmenistan sits on the Southeastern quadrant of the
Caspian Sea, whose oil the Bush Administration dearly
covets.

Afghanistan is necessary for two things: as a base of
operations to begin the process of destabilizing, breaking
off, and establishing control over the South Asian
Republics, which will begin within the next 18-24 months
in my opinion, and constructing a pipeline through
Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to deliver
petroleum to the Asian market.

The BBC was recently told by Niaz Naik, a Pakistani
Foreign Secretary, that senior American officials were
warning them as early as mid-July that military action
for mid-October was being planned for Afghanistan.
In 1996, the Department of Energy was issuing reports
on the desirability of a pipeline through Afghanistan,
and in 1998, Unocal testified before the House Subcommittee
on Asia and the Pacific that this pipeline was crucial
to transport Caspian Basin oil to the Indian Ocean.

Given this evidence that a military operation to secure
at least a portion of Afghanistan has been on the table,
possibly as early as five years ago, I can't help but
conclude that the actions we are seeing put into motion
now are part of a pre-September 11th agenda. I'm absolutely
sure of that, in fact. The planning alone for operations,
of this scale, that are now taking shape, would take
many months. And we are seeing them take shape in mere
weeks.

It defies common sense. This administration is lying
about this whole thing being a "reaction"
to September 11th. That leads me, in short order, to
be very suspicious of their yet-to-be-provided evidence
that someone in Afghanistan is responsible. It's just
too damn convenient. Which also leads me to wonder-just
for the sake of knowing-what actually did happen on
September 11th, and who actually is responsible.

The so-called evidence is a farce. The US presented
Tony Blair's puppet government with the evidence, and
of the 70 so-called points of evidence, only nine even
referred to the attacks on the World Trade Center,
and those points were conjectural. This is a bullshit
story from beginning to end. Presented with the available
facts, any 16-year old with a liking for courtroom
dramas could tear this story apart like a two-dollar
shirt. But our corporate press regurgitates it uncritically.
But then, as we should know by now, their role is to
legitimize.

This cartoon heavy they've turned bin Laden into makes
no sense, when you begin to appreciate the complexity
and synchronicity of the attacks. As a former military
person who's been involved in the development of countless
operations orders over the years, I can tell you that
this was a very sophisticated and costly enterprise
that would have left what we call a huge "signature".

In other words, it would be very hard to effectively
conceal.

So there's a real question about why there was no warning
of this. That can be a question about the efficacy
of the government's intelligence apparatus. That can
be a question about various policies in the various
agencies that had to be duped to orchestrate this action.
And it can also be a question about whether or not
there was foreknowledge of the event, and that foreknowledge
is being covered up. To dismiss this concern out of
hand as the rantings of conspiracy nuts is premature.
And there is a history of this kind of thing being
done by national political bosses, including the darling
of liberals, Franklin Roosevelt. The evidence is very
compelling that the Roosevelt Administration deliberately
failed to act to stop Pearl Harbor in order to mobilize
enough national anger to enter the World War II.

I have no idea why people aren't asking some very specific
questions about the actions of Bush and company on
the day of the attacks.

Follow along:

Four planes get hijacked and deviate from their flight
plans, all the while on FAA radar. The planes are all
hijacked between 7:45 and 8:10 AM Eastern Daylight
Time.

Who is notified?

This is an event already that is unprecedented. But
the President is not notified and going to a Florida
elementary school to hear children read.

By around 8:15 AM, it should be very apparent that something
is terribly wrong. The President is glad-handing teachers.

By 8:45, when American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into
the World Trade Center, Bush is settling in with children
for his photo ops at Booker Elementary. Four planes
have obviously been hijacked simultaneously, an event
never before seen in history, and one has just dived
into the worlds best know twin towers, and still no
one notifies the nominal Commander in Chief.

No one has apparently scrambled any Air Force interceptors
either.

At 9:03, United Flight 175 crashes into the remaining
World Trade Center building. At 9:05, Andrew Card,
the Presidential Chief of Staff whispers to George
W. Bush. Bush "briefly turns somber" according
to reporters.

Does he cancel the school visit and convene an emergency
meeting? No.

He resumes listening to second graders read about a
little girl's pet fucking goat, and continues this
banality even as American Airlines Flight 77 conducts
an unscheduled point turn over Ohio and heads in the
direction of Washington DC.

Has he instructed Chief of Staff Card to scramble the
Air Force? No.

An excruciating 25 minutes later, he finally deigns
to give a public statement telling the United States
what they already have figured out; that there's been
an attack by hijacked planes on the World Trade Center.

There's a hijacked plane bee-lining to Washington, but
has the Air Force been scrambled to defend anything
yet? No.

At 9:30, when he makes his announcement, American Flight
77 is still ten minutes from its target, the Pentagon.

The Administration will later claim they had no way
of knowing that the Pentagon might be a target, and
that they thought Flight 77 was headed to the White
House, but the fact is that the plane has already flown
South and past the White House no-fly zone, and is
in fact tearing through the sky at over 400 nauts.

At 9:35, this plane conducts another turn, 360 degrees
over the Pentagon, all the while being tracked by radar,
and the Pentagon is not evacuated, and there are still
no fast-movers from the Air Force in the sky over Alexandria
and DC.

Now, the real kicker: A pilot they want us to believe
was trained at a Florida puddle-jumper school for Piper
Cubs and Cessnas, conducts a well-controlled downward
spiral, descending the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half
minutes, brings the plane in so low and flat that it
clips the electrical wires across the street from the
Pentagon, and flies it with pinpoint accuracy into
the side of this building at 460 nauts.

When the theory about learning to fly this well at the
puddle-jumper school began to lose ground, itwas added
that they received further training on a flight simulator.

This is like saying you prepared your teenager for her
first drive on I-40 at rush hour by buying her a video
driving game. It's horse shit!

There is a story being constructed about these events.
My crystal ball is not working today, so I can't say
why.

But at the least, this so-called Commander-in-Chief
and his staff that we are all supposed to follow blindly
into some ill-defined war on terrorism is criminally
negligent or unspeakably stupid. And at the worst,
if more is known or was known, and there is an effort
to conceal the facts, there is a criminal conspiracy
going on.

Certainly, the Bush de facto administration was facing
a confluence of crises from which they were temporarily
rescued by this event. Whether they played a sinister
role or not, there is little doubt that they have at
the very least opportunistically pounced on this attack
to overcome their lack of legitimacy, to shift the
blame for the encroaching recession from capitalism
to the September 11th terror attack, to legitimize
their pre-existing foreign policy agenda, and to establish
and consolidate repressive measures domestically and
silence dissent. In many ways, September 11th pulled
the Bush cookies out of the fire.

And given them the green light to begin constructing
a long-term scenario within which to establish fascistic
control measures at home and abroad as a citadel for
the ruling class in the catastrophic conjuncture that
we are entering based on the end of oil.

This elephant in the living room is being studiously
ignored. In fact, the domestic repression has already
begun, officially and unofficially. It's kind of a
latter day McCarthyism. I participated in a teach-in
at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on the 17th of September,
and though not a single person on the panel excused
or justified the attacks, and every person there offered
either condolences and prayers for the victims, we
were excoriated within two days as "enemies of
America." Yesterday an op-ed called for my deportation
(to where, one can only guess). Now Herr Ashcroft is
fast tracking the biggest abrogation of US civil liberties
since the so-called anti-terrorism legislation after
the Oklahoma City bombing - which by the way hasn't
resulted in anti-terrorism but in the acceleration
of the application of the racist death penalty. The
FBI has defined terrorist groups not by whether any
given group has ever acted as terrorists, but by their
beliefs. Some socialists and anti-globalization groups
have already been identified by name as terrorist groups,
even though there is not a single shred of evidence
that they have ever participated in any criminal activity.
It reminds me of the Smith Act that was finally declared
unconstitutional, but only after a hell of a lot of
people served a hell of a long time in jail for the
crime of thinking.

I think this also points to yet another huge problems
that the Bush regime was facing. Worldwide resistance
to the whole so-called neoliberal agenda, which is
a prettied up term for debt-leverage imperialism. While
debt and the threat of sanctions has been used to coerce
nations in the periphery, we have to understand that
the final guarantor of compliance remains military
action. For a global economic agenda, there is always
a corresponding political and military agenda.

The focal point of these actions in the short term is
Southern Asia, but they have already scripted this
as a worldwide and protracted fight against terrorism.

It's far better than drug wars as a rationalization,
and the drug war thing was being discredited in any
case. Leftists are regaining power and popularity in
Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Colombia,
the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Brazil, and Argentina.
Cuba has gained immense prestige over the last few
years. The empire is beginning to unravel. We can hardly
justify intervention in these places by saying they
are not towing the economic line by allowing the absolute
domination of their societies by transnational corporations.
That exposes the agenda. So we simply claim they are
supporting terrorism.

It's for all these reasons I say the left has missed
the boat on this one, by allowing them to get away
with rushing past the question of who did what on September
11th. If the official story is a lie, and I think the
circumstantial case is strong enough to stay with this
question, then we really do need to know what happened.
And we need to understand concretely what the motives
of this administration are.

And we need to understand more than just their immediate
motives, but where the larger social forces that underwrite
our situation right now are headed. I do not think
this administration is engaged in the deliberative
process of a political grouping that is on top of their
game. They are putting together some very deliberative
technical solutions in response to a larger situation
that it slipping rapidly out of their control. Like
clear cutting. There's a very smart technology being
employed to do a very dumb thing.

What they are responding to is not September 11th, but
the beginning of a permanent and precipitous decline
in worldwide oil production, the beginning of a deep
and protracted worldwide recession, and the unraveling
of the empire.

This brings me to a point about what all this means
for Americans' security, which they are perfectly justified
to worry about. The actions being prepared by this
administration will not only not enhance our security,
it will significantly degrade it. Military action against
many groups across the globe, which is what the administration
is telling us quite openly they are planning to do,
will put a lot of backs against the wall. That can't
be very secure.

The concept of war being touted here is a violation
of the principles of war on several counts, and will
inevitably lead to military catastrophes, if you're
inclined to view this from a position of moral and
political neutrality.

And the people who are now in possession of half the
world's remaining oil reserves are subject to destabilization
for which we can't even pretend to predict the consequences-but
loss of access to critical energy supplies is certainly
within the realm of possibility. Worst of all, we will
be destabilizing Pakistan, a nuclear power in an active
conflict with its neighbor, and we will be provoking
Russia, another nuclear power. The security stakes
don't get any higher, and Americans can ill afford
to ignore nukes.

And I think that this domestic agenda is a tremendous
threat to the security of anyone who is critical of
the government or their corporate financiers, and we
already know that the real threats are against populations
that can easily be scapegoated as the domestic crisis
deepens.

There is a very real threat right now of creeping fascism
in this country, and that phenomenon requires its domestic
enemies. Historically those enemies have included leftists,
trade unionists, and racially and nationally oppressed
sectors. This whole "state of emergency"
mentality is already being used to quiet the public
discourses of anti-racism, of feminism, of environmentalism,
and of both socialism and anarchism. And while there
is token resistance by officials to anti-Muslim xenophobia,
the stereotypical images have saturated the media,
and the government is already beginning to openly re-instate
racial profiling. It is only a short step from there
to go after other groups. We have long been prepared
by the ideologies of overt and covert racism, and racism
as both institution and corresponding psychology in
the United States is nearly intractable.

It's for all these reasons that I say emphatically that
we can not accept anything from this administration;
not their policies nor their bullshit stories. What
they are doing is very, very dangerous, and the time
to fight back against them, openly, is right now, before
they can consolidate their power and their agenda.
Once they have done that, our job becomes much more
difficult.

The left, if it has the capacity to self-organize out
of its oblivion, needs to understand its critical roles
here. We have to play the role of credible, hard-working,
and non-sectarian partners in a broader peace-movement.
We have to study, synthesize, and describe our current
historical conjuncture. And we have to prepare leadership
for the decisive conflict that will emerge to first
defeat fascism then take political power.

Rosa Luxemburg's words are truer than ever right now.
We are not faced with a choice between socialism and
capitalism, but socialism or barbarism.

And what we can least afford are denial and timidity.

Stan Goff

Stan Goff

I strongly recommend, for anyone who wants to find further
background material on the issues herein check out
the websites at dieoff.org, emperors-clothes.com, and
globalcircle.net.